King of the Mild Frontier (13 page)

Now, understand that the front door to our house was a large double French door opening out onto a sprawling front lawn. The back door was a standard-sized door just off the kitchen that opened onto a patch of backyard. I could have escaped out the front without notice, simply hollering, “I'm going outside to play” as I disappeared through it. But that would have been unfair. The trick for me was to try to get through the kitchen past my grieving mother.

I'd walk through, pulling on my jacket. “I'm gonna go out and play for a while.”

Sigh. “Okay, honey. Have a good time.”

“What's wrong?”

“Oh, nothing. You just run along. I'll be fine.”

“It sounds like there's something wrong.”

“No, dear. I'm fine. You run along.”

But I didn't. I'd stand and wait, feeling for a moment like a hit-and-run driver, wanting to go ahead, inching toward the door.…

“It's just hard, that's all.”

Shit.
“What's hard?”

And off it went. She was loosened up enough to lament about the sad state of world affairs or her life, which, at that degree of impairment, were one and the same. I did my best to convince her things weren't as bad as they felt (I learned that from watching her do it with her depressed friends), and she did her best not to be convinced, interrupting me every half hour or so to tell me to go outside or my friends would be done, and I'd say, “I'll go in a minute” and never do it. She'd finally go to bed and pass out; I'd go upstairs to my room with some faint feeling of having saved her. After “The Star-Spangled Banner” played to end the TV day, Crutch would go into the bedroom and read himself to sleep. My mother, by her own report, never had a hangover in her life, so she got up early in the morning, ahead of him, and fixed his breakfast. My father was a voracious reader—of any genre, fiction or nonfiction—and because he loved to read in a completely quiet house each morning, she went back to bed until it was time to get us up to go to school.

As I said, they seldom fought out loud and seemed to treat each other respectfully, at least as I understood respect at the time. They promoted and supported their kids' accomplishments, and no one in town knew the amounts of alcohol that were consumed in our house.
That's
what I
thought marriage was, and I didn't want any part of it.

Though I could never have come to this conclusion
then,
I now look back at my parents' relationship without judgment. It wasn't a
good
thing that my dad could turn almost any situation into a PBS moment, any more than it was a
bad
thing that I felt responsible for my mother's emotional well-being, any more than it's good or bad that what I learned from all that probably shaped the best and worst parts of my relationships with women in the following years. I'm sure I shied away from traditional family life because of what I saw, but a traditional family life would surely have steered me in a different direction from the one I took, and I would likely not have had the experiences as a teacher and a therapist and a writer that I have had. It's easy to look back and say if things had been
perfect,
I could have accommodated all of those things into my life. But as a therapist I do not allow that word to be uttered in my office after the first session, because I believe the only reason for the existence of that word is to make us feel bad. It's the only word in the language (that I know of) that is defined in common usage by what
can't
be. It sets a vague standard that can't be met because it is never truly characterized. I prefer to think that we're all out here doing our best under the circumstances, looking at our world through the only eyes
through which we can look at it: our own. The universe is kind enough to give us as many chances as we need to work through the things that cause us pain, and loving enough not to care whether or not we remedy them.

For the final seventeen years of my mother's life she was clean and sober, and discovered things about herself she might never have discovered had she not been impaired all those years and determined to stay free of that impairment. In the end, it is what it is.

 

I came back to work one more year in my father's service station during the summer after my freshman year in college and had an enlightening conversation with him. We were sitting in the front office during a lull in business, and I said, “So what was the big deal with all the table manners?”

“I just didn't want you to go out in the world and embarrass yourself.”

I said, “Crutch, if I ask the guys I eat with to pass the bread, I better be ready to go long. If I take the butter from the butter plate with the butter knife, which is nonexistent, and put it on my plate before breaking my bread into quarters and buttering it a piece at a time, the butter melts on the hot plate, and all my buddies want to know if my condition has been diagnosed.”

My father was unflappable. “I wasn't teaching you to eat with animals,” he said. “It's for those times when you need them.”

I said, “Something must have happened to you. This manners thing has to be the result of some trauma. I mean, I get your demand for Certified Clean Restrooms á la Phillips 66 and making us wear these nineteen-forties uniforms. But the manners—”

“Her name was Rosa Campbell,” he said.

I made a mental note to remember that name.

“Her folks belonged to the Kellogg Country Club. Mine had just joined. I was a junior in high school, and her parents invited me and my parents to the club for dinner there because I'd been taking Rosa out and they wanted to get to know me. I had the etiquette thing down. My dad taught me everything I taught you. And then someone passed the bread. I took a piece from the plate and put it on my own. I broke it in half. I used the butter knife to get a patty of butter and placed it on the edge of my plate, replacing the butter knife on the butter plate. I broke one of the halves in half again, took a small piece of the butter with my own knife and began buttering my bread.”

My god, how did the man ever get any food in him?

“And Rosa leaned over and whispered, ‘Butter your
bread a little closer to the plate.'”

I said, “What?”

“Buddy, I've never been so embarrassed.”

“Why didn't you reach across the table, take her soft neck gently in your hands, and pop her head off?”

“Because she was
right
.”

“She may have been correct,” I said, “but she sure wasn't right. Do you mean to tell me my dinners have been fraught with anxiety for eighteen years because some country club debutante called you out?”

“You had to be there.”

My father is dead now; he died when he was sixty-two. He was twenty-four when I was born, so if Rosa is still alive, she's got to be around seventy-nine or eighty. She could easily still be living.

Rosa, if you're out there, be afraid. I'm coming for you.

AN UNUSUAL PATH LEADS
from my life as a coonskin-cap-wearing, pimply-faced, 123-pound offensive lineman with a string of spectacularly dismal attempts at romance to a storyteller of modest acclaim. Sometimes I stand before an auditorium filled with students or a banquet room filled with librarians and/or teachers, and I shake my head at the fact that I am living proof the universe will allow almost anything.

Due to our location in the center of a high valley surrounded by higher mountains, television came late to Cascade and was highly anticipated. Few homes had TV sets
before my fifth-grade year. From what I had seen of TV on my infrequent trips to Boise, and in the homes of the few lucky townsfolk who got it ahead of the rest of us, I imagined a very different life: one in which I would lounge on the couch eating popcorn and drinking Coke, our living room having been transformed into a movie theater, staring into that magic box every possible moment. That imagination did not include time for homework. Our first TV set, of course, came with more rules than you might find at the Crutcher dinner table, compliments of one John W. Crutcher, aka Crutch. In the end, all the rules boiled down to one, and a river ran through it: TV time was earned with, and only with, matching homework time or homework completion. I got my first look at TV and was sold. I'd do my homework as fast as I could, slap it down on the table in front of my mom or dad, and turn the on knob. The more I watched, the more I loved it. By sixth grade I was the only kid in my class who could tell you the time and date of every program on both channels for any day of the week. I figured a guy ought to log about six or seven hours a day in front of that thing if he were going to be truly TV literate, and of course as I graduated from grade to grade and more homework was required, the matching mathematics was driving me crazy. Pretty soon I was trading a half hour for a half
hour, having to make excruciating choices of which programs to watch and which to sacrifice, while also having to negotiate with the rest of my family members at any point of conflict. (If the conflict was with my father, it was resolved very quickly.) As I passed through junior high into high school, it became clearer and clearer that I needed to find some radical shortcut through my assignments.

My brother, John, was nearly three years older than I but preceded me in school by only two years, due to our birth months. John took his studies seriously and graduated as valedictorian of his class. On those few report-card days when he failed to get straight As, he pulled the drapes. I watched him through the insulation of those two years, the pressure he put on himself to succeed, the expectations from my parents that came with it, and decided I could use the fact that my mother had cured my temper by whacking my head against the bathtub to my advantage, claiming mild to moderate brain damage. From me, they could expect Cs. I came to imagine myself the perfect C student, to which there was a certain poetic balance, all my initials being C. C level was my perfect spot; my dad couldn't really get passionate about Cs in the way he could get passionate about Ds and downright righteous about Fs. For Cs he was only irritated, a state in which I kind of liked to keep him. A guy
shouldn't make things too easy for an ex-bomber pilot.

I could earn Cs with a minimum of time and effort directed at schoolwork, but what I really wanted was to earn them with no effort, and that quest may actually have bumped me in the direction of future storyteller: I'm headed for the storage closet off John's bedroom one afternoon in my freshman year, to root around for old baseball cards he tricked me out of through the years. (“Man, I guess I'm doing this because you're my brother,” he'd say, “and I must be out of my mind, but I'll give you
three
Marv Throneberrys and two Joe Garagiolas for this one bent Mickey Mantle and a Hank Aaron.”) I enter this closet on penalty of death if he catches me, because this closet is the inner sanctum of his inner sanctum, ground where even Moses would remove his shoes. But I am safe, because John's off with Bonnie Heavrin—soon to be traumatized by a glorious hairy scab—and I know by the whisker burns I've noticed on her chin lately that he will not be back soon.

The closet is a huge walk-in with unfinished walls and a single bulb dangling on a frayed cord from the ceiling just above the entrance. The switch is broken, so you simply screw the bulb tight. I open the door, reach up, and twist the bulb, and immediately hear celestial music…because in the back of my brother's closet is every assignment he's ever
done. They are separated by year and by class: his freshman year on the left, his sophomore year next to it, what has been completed to date of his junior year…
my
freshman year,
my
sophomore year,
my
junior year. I instantly become what I now believe is one of the first recorded academic ecologists, because for the rest of my high-school career I will recycle every bit of that at which I now stare in awed and thankful reverence.

I'll have to do a
little
work, because I don't want to be stuck with As and the expectations that go with them, so I'll misspell some words, come to some wrong conclusions, miss some math answers by a decimal point or a few digits, hand those babies in, and migrate toward TV Land.

By the middle of my sophomore year I have my homework time down to about a half hour a day, counting the fifteen minutes I take getting in and out of the magic closet undetected, taking pains to replace each paper or project exactly as I found it. This is far too valuable a resource to be handled in my usual shoddy manner. I am lulling myself into near illiteracy. But there are a few holes in my system, and I sometimes trace my writing career back to one of those forty-below winter days of that same year.

When we get that kind of nostril-freezing weather, everyone gets to school early because it's the warmest building in
town, and I enter my sophomore English classroom about forty minutes early, noticing a number of finished projects on my fellow students' desks as I move through the rows to my desk.

I drop my books and elbow Larry Logue. “What's that?” I ask, pointing to his paper.

“Book report,” he says.

“What book report?”

“The book report that's due at the start of the period,” he says.

Shit.
Cascade is small, but it's not small enough for me to run home and get one of my brother's reports, copy it over, and get it back in time to hand it in as the bell rings. But I never work without a net. The before-school librarian is Nancy Roberts, a girl in my class, and I just happen to know, because it is the kind of information a man of my limited integrity
needs
to know, that behind the librarian's desk in a locked room is a set of books called Master Plots, which contains a synopsis of each of a great number of classics. The operative word here is “synopsis.”

I have been working at my father's service station since I was nine years old. I have money. I'm down to the library and on my knees before the checkout desk in the time it takes to say
“A Tale of Two Cities,”
begging Nancy Roberts
for time in that room at a buck a minute, but Nancy has a better memory for my past gross inappropriateness with her than I would have counted on and sends me packing. Never leave your destiny in the hands of a girl who holds a grudge.

I'm approaching panic mode. While Cs may be borderline tolerable in my household, showing up with no homework is a mortal sin, and I am setting records that would make my track coach proud, dashing back to the classroom to offer a king's ransom for even an old junior high report. No reports come forward, and interest mounts. Maybe Crutcher will finally pay for his astonishing lethargy.

Then it occurs to me: Mrs. Phelps, my English teacher, might be smart and well read, but no way has she read every book ever written. I can make this baby up. I scribble a title onto the center of the top line of my three-ring binder, and a story begins forming through the panic signals in my brain. It's a brilliant story, really—for about three sentences, at which time it starts to get stupid, and does not stop getting stupid until it reaches Ripley's Believe It or Not! status. But I'm not worried about that because when I get to the critique, I'll just say, “This is the stupidest story I've ever read. I don't see how it even got published.”

So I write an idiotic report followed by a critique worthy of a disgruntled postman critiquing his delivery manual, read
it over quickly. Aaaugh! No author! And I'm in full panic mode now, a condition that allows me to recall the names of only two authors: Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway. Mrs. Phelps may not have read every book ever written, but she'll know in a heartbeat that neither Mark nor Ernie wrote this piece of shit, so I'm out of my desk and down to the office, where the Boise Yellow Pages lies mercifully open on the secretary's desk. I take out my pen, close my eyes, and drop it point first onto some plumber, who becomes the author of my first novel.

Now that's not a paper you put on top of the pile. You slide it into the middle, where you figure she'll be about two hours into her grading, head bobbing, maybe a little drool on the page, give me my C and get on with it. At the sound of the bell I slide it in there. But as I'm walking back toward my desk the thing happens that happens to all who would seek and take the low road: The paranoids grab me by the throat. Man, I am in
so
much trouble.

By the end of the following period I figure Mrs. Phelps has already looked through the reports and probably knows, by lunch I figure she's called my dad, and by midafternoon I'm expecting the county sheriff. Luckily the sheriff is my uncle, so at least I won't go out in cuffs.

But then it occurs to me what my father would say if she
really
called him: “Let's give him a chance to tell on himself,” because my dad is one of those guys who
always
says, “Chris, it would have gone a lot easier on you if you'd just told the truth.” But if you do tell the truth, you don't know what would have happened if you didn't, so even with all the mental illness ricocheting around the inside of my skull, I decide to wait.

Correcting those reports is a three-day project for Mrs. Phelps, and by the day they are to be returned, I've lost about fifteen pounds in nervous runoff. Cascade School is one of those old two-story buildings with solid hardwood floors, and as Mrs. Phelps, in her three-inch-high heels, comes down the hall, it is dead man walkin'. I put my head in my arms and openly defy the new law prohibiting prayer in schools. Mrs. Phelps enters, followed quickly by the sound of the reports slapping onto the surface of each person's desk. I'm fully expecting to feel the lobe of my ear between her thumb and forefinger as she drags me to the front of the classroom to make a public display of the banishment of a worthless no-account scum cheater. At this point, I'd be satisfied with an F. I just don't want to be caught.

My paper slaps onto the surface of my desk beside my head, and I whip through the twenty-third psalm, cross
myself, promise to keep my hands out of my pajama bottoms for six months if this turns out in my favor, and sneak a look: A minus. The minus is circled, and beside it Mrs. Phelps left me a note.
This was an excellent report; I especially enjoyed the critique. I docked you half a grade because you didn't clear the book with me before you read it.
I stare. I read it again. I thank the Lord and silently tell Him I only meant six
days
—five days longer than my previous record.

I usually tell that story to an audience of at least ninety percent students, drastically increasing my chances of a favorable response. (The other ten percent can be heard whispering—loudly and rudely—“Are we
paying
this guy?”) But the rest of the story is that I was thirty-five when I began writing because I had to catch up on all those stories I missed. Simple fact: If I don't read, I don't write. Serendipity
did
get me to read one book during my high-school years. Mrs. Phelps assigned us
To Kill a Mockingbird
in the latter part of my sophomore year. My brother didn't have a
Mockingbird
report stashed in his storage closet of infinite goodies because it was a best-seller, only recently out in paperback. I read the front and back covers, hoping to glean enough information to sketch out a C-minus report, but when that wasn't sufficient, I began reading the first chapter and simply couldn't put it down. (When I say I
couldn't put a book down, I mean I read it inside a month.) I couldn't believe this was a book. It didn't even give me a headache. I wanted to know Scout and Jem and Dill. I wanted to sit on the Finchs' porch on a warm summer evening and listen to Atticus's wisdom, watch him draw a bead on that rabid dog, and feel bad that he had to pull the trigger.

Mrs. Phelps probably didn't know it, but she had me. All she had to do was give me another book like that, but instead she gave me
Silas Marner.
I have often said the only thing worse than
being
Silas Marner is having to read about him, and I remain unbowed in that opinion. My worst fears were realized. Only one good book had been written. And now I'd already read it.

In my junior year in college I had the good fortune of becoming friends with Terry Davis, future author of
Vision Quest, Mysterious Ways,
and
If Rock and Roll Were a Machine.
Coincidence brought us together again several years after graduation (he graduated on the dean's list; I graduated magna cum lucky) in the San Francisco Bay area, where he attended Stanford University on a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and I taught in, then directed, an alternative school in Oakland for students who weren't making it in the Oakland public schools. Davis and I would meet every
Friday, go for a run, have dinner and a couple of beers while he read chapters from his first draft of
Vision Quest.
As I've said, I was never much of a student, but this was a look at storytelling from the inside, which is how I learn best. He would read a chapter, we would talk about what worked and what didn't, share responses to the characters. Then Terry would take it home and work it over and bring it back, always better, always deeper.